Posted in: ABC, NBC, TV | Tagged: ABC, andy kaufman, Carol Kane, nbc, Taxi, The View

Star Trek: SNW Star Carol Kane on Taxi, Andy Kaufman's Worldly Prank

Carol Kane (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) reflects on the epic prank Taxi co-star Andy Kaufman pulled on her during ABC's The View.

Actor and comedian Andy Kaufman never believed in sticking to a conventional canvas when it came to his humor as long as he found it funny and only he (and sometimes creative partner Bob Zmuda) was in on the joke. While he spent a portion of his career as a misogynist heel wrestler, his peers from Hollywood were certainly not spared from his hijinks, including his castmates on Taxi as the surviving cast (Danny DeVito, Judd Hirsch, Marilu Henner, Tony Danza, and Christopher Lloyd) reunited on ABC's The View for its 45th anniversary. Veteran comedic actress Carol Kane (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds), who played Simka Gravas, the wife of Kaufman's character, Eastern European mechanic Latka Gravas, opened up about a prank he pulled on her when trying to do a character study.

"I thought it was so complicated, I wanted to sound just like him. There were some words, but most of it was just made up, and when I [asked] him, 'I really need to study this, how do you do it?' He said, 'Well, it's just like when you're a little kid and you open your mouth and speak Russian or Chinese.' For him, it was just an easy, natural thing because he could channel being a kid," Kane said, adding that Kaufman once told her that, to perfect the inflection, they needed to practice speaking to people from international regions. Kaufman based Latka on his "foreign man" character among his several impressions.

"[Andy] said, 'We have to go out to dinner, we have to go somewhere where no one will recognize us, so we're going to Mexico.' So, I pull up to his house in Laurel Canyon, and he gets on the phone, and he's on the phone forever in the kitchen, and I finally came in and said to him, 'Andy, if we're going to Mexico, we better go now. We better leave,'" Kane said. "He looked at me like I was out of my mind, that I believed him. He thought I was nuts. So, we go to a Chinese restaurant and we arranged a thing where I told him what I wanted, he ordered in English, and the waiter would come and ask me what I wanted, and I had to do it in the language. We sat there for a couple hours, pretending that I spoke it, and, in a while, I spoke it!"

Two of his most famous examples of Kaufman pranking Hollywood are his wrestling feud with Jerry Lawler spilled over to NBC's Late Night with David Letterman, where the host found himself in the most awkward position that found Lawler slapping Kaufman out of his chair, resulting in the latter returning and ranting obscenities on live television. Another is a sketch on the ABC late-night variety series Fridays that found Kaufman breaking character acting flustered as the bit called for the principal cast to act stoned on marijuana. The actor, who died in 1984 from a rare form of cancer, was celebrated posthumously with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in August, and WWE inducted him into their Hall of Fame, both in 2023.

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